1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally concerns online polling and voting. The present invention more specifically concerns the solicitation of input and contributions from an online community, real-time ranking the input and contributions, and ongoing consideration of dynamic changes to the community input and contributions while concurrently ranking the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Client and cloud based voting and polling applications currently exist in the art. These applications are typically used by groups of individuals whose input is being solicited by a person or organization. The organizations soliciting input can ask questions and end-users can vote on or respond to those questions. These questions are typically framed such that they solicit or require a simple yes/no or fixed multiple-choice vote.
The social networking site Facebook offers a polling/question application. An organization seeking input or feedback from users in the Facebook community implements the application in the Facebook environment by filling out a short HTML based poll/question creation form to generate the poll or query as illustrated in FIG. 1. The poll creation form generates the specific query (the question being asked of polled individuals) and the possible response options (yes, no, etc). Users are then able to select from amongst those options.
Other polling applications attempt to prioritize or rank user responses and submissions that have been solicited based on open ended questions. SurveyMonkey offers a variety of browser based polling services. These services allow for the generation of survey questions that trigger a response based on fixed responses, ratings, images, comments and essay boxes.
While SurveyMonkey allows for more ‘free flow’ based answers in the context of commentary or textual responses, a poll or survey creator must create a validation scheme that includes information related to a specified format for the response entry. When the criteria are not met, the respondent receives an error message, which may discourage the respondent from further participation in the poll or survey. Ranking of free form answers is difficult due to the presence of any number of variables. Not all of these variables may be present when a user proffers a vote or response meaning that not all responses may be equally or properly weighted.
A common drawback of these and other known polling applications is that once a user participates, the user is typically prevented from taking part in any further interaction by way of a cookie deposited on the computing device of the user or tracking data associated with a user profile. ‘One and done’ voting systems prevent a user from offering their opinion should it change after their initial vote is cast or opinion is proffered. Alternatively, a user may be allowed unlimited participation in a polling event. Such unlimited participation is, however, incorrectly characterized as that of a new participant. As a result, one user may vote 100 times and erroneously be considered the single vote of 100 separate participants. Such unlimited participation may skew poll results, especially if a particular user has an agenda with respect to the outcome of the poll (e.g., voting for a favorite player in the All-Star Game) and also incorrectly reflects the overall interest of a specific community in the question being asked.
In light of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for the solicitation of dynamic user input and the concurrent ranking of the same.